The advertising copy for a product was manipulated along two structural dimensions (inside/outside product attributes, and before/after consequences of using product) to refine the concept of exposure in advertising research and to test a method of observing cognitive behavior while people are attending (exposed) to the media. The 78 participants in the study--39 who read the attribute copy and 39 who read the consequence copy--read their assigned advertisements once a day for three days so that changes in their thoughts across exposures could be recorded. During each exposure, all participants marked the ad with a slash whenever a thought occurred to them, while a randomly selected one-third of the sample population wrote what these thoughts were before returning to the task. The results showed that neither the structure nor the focus of thoughts changed across exposures in ways that were expected. Although the mean numbers of thoughts increased with additional ad exposure, their focus did not shift as hypothesized from attribute to consequence thoughts. Attribute and consequence thoughts also tended to reflect attribute and consequence advertisements, respectively. The idea that subjects would focus on the product during the first exposure and then on connections during second and third ads seemed only weakly supported. (RL)